Government Backed Accelerators Chosen - March On Finland!
Vigo, a Finnish government run program to strengthen the currently rather dismal foundation of Finnish risk capital ecosystem and to create international venture accelerators and investors in Finland (see our previous story here), has come to an end and now it's time to see what we got. And it does not look that bad at all.
In total, three venture accelerators where chosen by the steering board, which was lead by Mr. Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of F-Secure Corporation, Member of the Board at Nokia and a prominent business angel among other things. It seems that the Vigo steering board was looking into finding teams to cover various different industries and compliment each other instead of creating competition into the Finnish venture capital scene. They seems to have found three such 'mutually exclusive' teams to fit the bill, namely Lifeline Ventures, Lots and Veturi Venture Accelerator. Here's a short description of each in turn.
IdeaForum 2008 Pitch Competition Open - Good Prizes
IdeaForum is a pitching competition being organised by Venture Cup Finland on the 29th of October in Helsinki. The idea is simple of course, you have two minutes to pitch your idea to a group of investors (the jury) and you cannot use any additional materials, except for a piece of paper (or perhaps you have the product available at hand).
If you wish to participate, you should send in your details by the 27th of October to this address including participant's name, phone number and the idea that is going to be presented. Participants will be contacted by phone. The grand prize for two minutes' of work is 1000€.
The jury is made up of five people, Moaffak Ahmed (Veturi Growth Partners), Teemu Seppälä (Helsinki University of Technology/Innovation centre), Petri Laine (Vera Venture), Juho Kinnunen (Eqvitec) and Antti Vilpponen (ArcticStartup). More information on the event here (the english part is at the bottom).
